I am a dinosaur.

I fear I am a dinosaur. Approaching sixtieth year next month, I was raised in an a text-intense era of reading, writing and ‘rithmatic. See Jane run. See Dick run.

But the atmosphere of my 1950s world was being occupied, slowly but surely, with invisible electromagnetic waves. The television networks were programming my airspace with images of Lucy and Desi and Howdy Doody. Electronic images were claiming vast regions of my grey matter. By the time I Dream of Jeanie came along, I was a captive. But I rebelled, like James Dean or Easy Rider, or Dylan. Pat and I got rid of the TV in 1983. But the DVD player has sucked us back in, and the evidence is more abundant every day that I am a text-obsessed dinosaur.

So nowadays, while the grey matter exposes its feeble fragility as greying hair, I can see that the world is being converted from text-driven communications to video impressions.
You’ve heard of French impressionism; this is 21st century version: video impressionism. What you see as what you get, everywhere you go, all the time.

Ideas are obsolete; it’s all about images now. My children thrive in this brave new world, for the next thirty or so years, because it is their native territory, as mine was Ozzie and Harriet. Thirty or so years from now they’ll become dinosaurs like me.
As the blue-eyed dinosaur of my parents’ generation used to sing: That’s life; that’s what all the people say–ridin high in the ’60s, shot down today.(my revised version)

Meanwhile I write little ditties like this, or even long treatises, while everybody else posts videos on Facebook, until the medicare panels come and take me to the old folks home where I’ll dither in TV heaven for a few years; then I fly to the real heaven. That should be an improvement; maybe folks there will be sitting around reading the Bible instead of watching UTube.